


December 19, 1991

by Finely Honed (jaqen_hgar)



Series: Imagine Tony & Bucky [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Dreams vs. Reality, Dreamsharing, Falling In Love, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Reunions, Tony Stark Feels, We Meet In Dreams, Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-12
Updated: 2015-03-12
Packaged: 2018-03-17 13:21:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3530903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jaqen_hgar/pseuds/Finely%20Honed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <span class="small">Prompt: AU idea where Bucky and Tony meet in dreams occasionally and have done since Tony's parents died. Tony thinks it's just his subconscious trying to cope with the grief and Bucky doesn't remember any of it as the Winter Soldier, but then Steve brings him to the tower, and they recognize each other.</span>
</p><p>It is December 19, 1991 and Tony Stark is sleeping. This is significant for several reasons.</p><p>For a start, this is the first he’s slept since sometime early on December 16th. He’s gone without sleep for longer—both with and without the intervention of illegal stimulants—so it isn’t so much <em>that</em> as it is the fact that his parents haven’t been alive since December 16th.</p><p>The thing is, when he’d agreed to go out clubbing on the night of the 16th—back when he still had parents—it hadn’t ever occurred to him that someone would show up at 5:43 p.m. on December 17th (<em>he’s still wasted from the night before, sweating the drugs out of his system, stinking of sex, and liquor</em>) to tell him his parents had stopped being alive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	December 19, 1991

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [19 Декабря 1991](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5769925) by [RenKagami (RenKrajnes)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RenKrajnes/pseuds/RenKagami)
  * Translation into 中文 available: [December 19, 1991](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6001408) by [hazelour](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hazelour/pseuds/hazelour)



> [hazelour](http://archiveofourown.org/users/hazelour/profile) has kindly translated this [into Chinese](http://www.movietvslash.com/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=179229&highlight=%B6%AC%CC%FA)!
> 
> Originally posted over on [imaginetonyandbucky.tumblr.com](http://imaginetonyandbucky.tumblr.com/). Be sure to stop on over and also enjoy the amazing contributions of [Potrix](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Potrix/pseuds/Potrix), [27dragons](http://archiveofourown.org/users/27dragons/pseuds/27dragons), [InnerCinema](http://archiveofourown.org/users/InnerCinema), and [kamaete](http://kamaete.tumblr.com/)!

It is December 19, 1991 and Tony Stark is sleeping. This is significant for several reasons.

For a start, this is the first he’s slept since sometime early on December 16th. He’s gone without sleep for longer—both with and without the intervention of illegal stimulants—so it isn’t so much  _that_ as it is the fact that his parents haven’t been alive since December 16th.

The thing is, when he’d agreed to go out clubbing on the night of the 16th—back when he still had parents—it hadn’t ever occurred to him that someone would show up at 5:43 p.m. on December 17th ( _he’s still wasted from the night before, sweating the drugs out of his system, stinking of sex, and liquor_ ) to tell him his parents had stopped being alive.

The funny thing, if you have a sick sense of humor, is that Tony hadn’t believed them. Not really, not even a little bit, because the idea that  _Howard Stark_  could be killed in something as déclassé as a car crash was just laughable.

And so, you know. He laughed.

He fucking  _laughed_  when they told him his parents…

But, see, the problem was, he’d actually thought he was about to be kidnapped again. It’d been awhile, he was overdue, and the timing just felt  _right_. They’d probably spotted him at the club, and followed him back, concocting this stupid story to get him to come along without a struggle.

So, maybe it says a little something about Tony Stark that he went with them. He was the right blend of high and bored and self destructive that the idea of being kidnapped sounded kind of fun. Besides, it’d piss Howard off to no end, and Tony sort of lived for that. Any reaction was better than no reaction where his father was concerned.

But then he was taken to identify their bodies.

And he remembered laughing.

And…

After that, sleep hadn’t been something he wanted anything to do with. Same with reality, for that matter. He managed to sneak away while Obie was on a phone call, and embarked upon an epic escape from reality. Booze, coke, anything else he could get his hands on.

All good things, as they say, must come to an end, and so when he ended, he ended hard. Back at the house, standing in his father’s study, this is when it actually begins to sink in that Howard—his father—isn’t alive. His mother isn’t alive.

Tony sobs so hard he genuinely worried about having a heart attack, or an aneurysm, or maybe choking to death on the tears. He cries for his mother, and he cries for his father, but mostly he cries for himself.

And, despite not wanting to in the least, on December 19th, Tony Stark finally falls asleep.

He dreams, and this is significant because this dream is unlike any other dream that has come before it. For quite some time after, he manages to convince himself it was brought on by a combination of the drugs still in his system, the grief, and overwhelming emotional, psychological, and physical exhaustion.

Nothing else makes sense, because one minute he’s in his father’s study, and the next he’s  _there_ , he’s watching it happen, only it isn’t anything like what the police had described. They never mentioned anything about this man standing in the road.

The lower half of his face is covered by some sort of muzzle, while the rest of him is hidden away under tight black leather, everything except the bright metallic gleam of his arm. There is a red star stamped on the shoulder, and Tony is so focused on the amazing mechanics at work in the prosthetic that he almost doesn’t recognize the car bearing down on them.

"What the fuck?" he yells, but suddenly everything is moving in slow motion.

The man does something, and the car—his father’s car—comes up and off of the road, and the headlights cut through the darkness, and Tony is momentarily blinded. When he can see again, he watches the man’s hair whip through the air as he turns, sees Tony, his eyes widening in shock.

And it’s strange, because later, when he is awake again, what sticks with Tony isn’t the sound of his mother screaming, or the unnatural sound of twisting metal, or shattering glass, or even his father hitting the windshield.

It’s this man’s eyes.

They’re blue. He can see that, even in the dark, even with so much of the blue being obscured by the bottomless pits of the man’s dilated pupils. His eyes are blue, and full of confusion and pain and terror. He’s not just confused to see Tony, either, if anything this man’s confusion seems to  _rival_ Tony’s; it’s as if  _everything_  is a mystery to this man, including his own actions.

He opens his mouth and speaks in what sounds like Russian. He takes two steps towards Tony, but something distracts him. They’re still alive. His parents. And, the man, he’s stalking over there, presumably to finish what he had started.

"Hey! Stop, that’s my mom!" Tony screams, and he tries to stop it from happening, he tries so hard, “Mom!” he shouts, but she doesn’t hear him, and he can’t move his limbs, they’re like lead, he’s stuck in place gasping and reaching and only able to watch.

The strange thing is, this man, the man with the piercing eyes, he’s  _crying_  as he places his hands over Howard’s nose and mouth and helps him stop being alive, just as he’d done moments before with Maria.

He finishes his task, and rises to his feet, begins walking to Tony only to stumble to his knees moments later. His hands go to his head, and he’s shouting in Russian, and when he tears off the mask he almost looks familiar.

"What have I done?" he asks Tony, and this is in English, and his blue, blue eyes are full of horror.

Tony wakes up screaming, knocks over a lamp in his father’s study, and the whole thing is so crazy that it takes two full minutes before he remembers that, dream or no, his parents are actually not alive anymore.

Understandable how he’d chalk something like that up to the drugs.

+

See, but the thing is, the guy makes a second appearance a couple of weeks later, and Tony is forced to reevaluate.

It’s been just long enough for Tony to have let his guard down, to have stopped avoiding sleep out of fear of being trapped in his own paralyzed body and forced to watch his parents get murdered in front of him.

This time, the dream is significantly different, which is good, but it isn’t exactly  _better_.

Tony’s first thought is, “I have a bad feeling about this,” because it looks like he’s been dropped somewhere on Hoth. Sure, if Han Solo wanted to show up and help him stay warm, that wouldn’t be so bad, as long as they weren’t doing it inside of a tauntaun.

Once he’s given up on spotting an Imperial AT-AT Walker, Tony finally notices the trail of blood in the snow. He follows it, which is how he finds the man. Tony almost doesn’t recognize him, because his hair is shorter, and his clothes are different, and he is the source of blood.

He’s on his knees in the snow, clutching what remains of his left arm, his head turning when he senses Tony approaching. Blue, and confused, his eyes are exactly the same, and even though it makes no sense, Tony is relieved to see him.

"Okay, so, let’s see. Stuck in a vast, cold wasteland, and you’re broken, bleeding, and sobbing. So, what, you’re a manifestation of my grief? What do you think?"

The man’s blue eyes seem to focus, and Tony thinks  _devastation_. He’s seen the pictures of himself at his parents funeral. He’d looked orphaned, but he hadn’t looked even half as devastated as this shaking figure in the snow.

His lips are blue, and it’s only then that Tony realizes he’s not cold, not at all. He’s wearing the same clothes he’d had on when he conked out on the couch. T-shirt, jeans, hoodie, sneakers.

Slowly, the man opens his mouth, and Tony thinks he actually hears his jaw creak with the effort. “What have I done?” he asks, his eyes growing even wilder, as he stares at Tony, desperate for an answer to this question.

It makes Tony uncomfortable, and he struggles to bite back a wisecrack, because he dislikes being confronted with this strange manifestation his subconscious has dredged up.

“What have I done?” he asks again, his eyes shifting. Tony follows his line of sight, and that is when he sees the bodies.

There are a lot of them. Some are stacked in a haphazard heap, others are strewn out across the snowy landscape, broken and bloody. He tries to count how many, but then he realizes his parents are there, they’re in the group closest to them, actually, cold, and dead, and staring at nothing and everything.

"Okay, this dream is bullshit. No way am I doing this!"

He is  _not_ sitting in the snow with this wounded projection of his subconscious, looking at a pile of corpses meant to represent his guilt and self loathing, or whatever other psycho-nonsense his brain is manifesting as a way to cope with the death of his parents.

In a panic, Tony grabs the man, and hauls him to his feet. The man’s body is stiff with the cold, but he follows Tony’s lead, allows himself to be manipulated.

He’s taller than Tony, and aside from appearing to be the embodiment of misery, he’s surprisingly handsome. There are tears frozen on his face, and his lips are so blue that Tony can’t help but touch them.

"Huh." At his touch, he feels the cold seeping out of the man and into his fingers as some of his warmth is transferred in the process. As he watches, the man’s skin becomes pinker, healthier looking. "Cool."

"What’s happening?" he asks, sounding as if  _he’s_  the one having the fucked up dream instead of Tony.

"We’re blowing this popsicle stand, that’s what’s happening."

Tony squeezes his eyes shut, keeping a tight grip on the shoulders of the man, and wills them somewhere else. When he opens his eyes again, they’ve ditched Hoth and traded it for Dagoba.

"Ta da! At least it’s warmer here."

The man sways on his feet. ”Warm.”

And he says it like its something he forgot existed. He sits down on a log nearby and shakes, holding the ruined aftermath of his arm.

"What happened to the metal one? That was cool. I’ve been trying to figure out how it’d work. You’d need a power source, and…"

The blue eyes are entirely focused on him now, and Tony has trouble with his words, because there is just so much pain in those eyes. He sits down on the log beside the man, and wraps an arm around his shoulders.

"Wow, I knew I was fucked up, but I didn’t realize it was  _this_  bad.”

The body beside his curls against him, shaking. “What have I done?”

"If you only ever say the same things, this’ll get boring real fast."

This time when he wakes up, he isn’t screaming, and Tony can’t chalk the weird dream up to anything other than his own fucked up head and heart, because he’d been sober for a change when he’d fallen asleep.

He spends the next few days reading everything he can about dream interpretations, but gives up after awhile, because it all sounds like horseshit to him. This is just how his brain has decided to help him work through his grief.

+

"Hey, it’s you again!”

The man is back in the black leather, and the cool arm has returned. He’s shooting at targets in the distance, and the landscape around him is one of fire and destruction. He looks incredibly badass, which Tony appreciates, because the whimpering wreck he’d encountered last time had left him feeling pretty low.

When the man speaks, it’s in Russian.

"Okay, so, I should understand this since we’re in my brain, but… I got nothing. Huh. Oh well, whatever. Let’s change the scenery!"

He takes them to Venice.

The man looks around, confused, but his eyes glimmer with recognition when he looks at Tony. He remains silent, just tilts his head, and narrows his eyes assessingly.

"Surprise, it’s me again." He shoves his hands in his pockets and rocks on his heels. "So, I’m going to just go with this, and introduce myself to myself, because why not? I’m Tony. What’s your name?"

The man stares at him. He answers in English, much to Tony’s delight. “Is this a test?”

"Uh, sure, maybe. No? I don’t know. I’m dreaming. What’s your name?"

The figure straightens, and he seems taller than Tony remembered him being. Also, now that’s he not bleeding and hanging out with Tony’s deceased parents, it’s easy to get distracted by his sex appeal. The leather is working for him in a big way, and so is the hair and the stubbled jaw, the slight pout to his lips, and those wild blue eyes.

"The asset is only the asset."

This drags Tony’s attention away from checking out his subconscious’s manifestation of whatever the fuck is still wrong with him.

"Good to know, I guess. I asked for a name, though."

Just like that he looks  _terrified_. Breathing heavily, eyes wide and glassy, his nostrils flare, and he stammers, “The only name the asset needs is that of the target.”

"Maybe I shouldn’t have given up on therapy so soon." Tony sighs, and rubs his temples. "Let’s play pretend! If you were actually a person and not just some weird coping mechanism, and someone asked you what to call you, you would say?"

He answers in a flurry of panicked Russian, and Tony sighs.

He wakes up. He also decides to learn Russian.

+

The next time it happens, they’re back in the snow, and there are new bodies amongst the others. Tony struggles to ignore the aching chasm that opens in his chest at the sight of his mother’s dead, sightless eyes gazing up at him beseechingly.

"No way we’re staying here. C’mon."

"What have I…"

"Nope, none of that, let’s _go_.”

Tony takes them to a beach. The man looks to be somewhere between the two versions Tony has seen so far. His hair is long, ragged, he has the prosthetic, but there’s no leather, just some sort of medical gown. His blue eyes are empty.

"Do you remember me?"

Tony isn’t sure why he’s asking since technically he’s talking to a part of himself, but for the sake of simplicity, he’s decided when this happens that he’s just going to treat this weird manifestation of grief as an independent operator. Maybe get to the bottom of what’s going on in his brain.

"You… You asked the asset questions." The man blinks several times, his eyes moving rapidly as if he is reading, or searching his memory, which is really Tony’s memory, so yeah, this isn’t weird at all. "Tony!"

He smiles triumphantly, and Tony has never seen a face so transformed. He’s  _beautiful_ when he smiles, and seeing it makes Tony’s heart lurch uncomfortably. There’s a strange, innocent joy he projects, as if managing to remember Tony’s name is the greatest accomplishment of his life.

"You got it!" Tony grins back. "Now it’s your turn. What’s your name?"

The joy slides away, replaced with wariness. “The asset is only that.”

Great. The asset crap again. “C’mon. Everyone has a name, even assets.”

"The asset is a tool. The asset is a weapon. It needs no name."

Tony frowns and folds his arms across his chest, groaning his annoyance as he rolls his eyes. It’s strange how his displeasure causes the man to tremble, an emotional response cascading across the handsome face as the wariness slides into fear and confusion and misery and finally resignation.

The man switches to Russian, and Tony is glad he’s been studying, because now he can actually understand. It takes him a bit—he’s been book learning, not having conversations with people in Russian—but he manages to muddle his way through.

"The asset has displeased you."

His nostrils are flaring, his breathing is fast and shallow. He’s stealing himself for something. He kneels, hands on his thighs, ramrod straight, eyes focused somewhere a few feet ahead of him. He trembles, and waits, and Tony stares, noticing strange little details.

Scars. Dried blood or maybe dirt caked under the fingernails of his flesh hand. The furrow of his brow, his pulse beating wildly and visibly in his neck. The bare feet. He stares, and the man shakes, and when he looks up, pleading, despondent, Tony realizes he’s expecting him to dole out some sort of… punishment.

"Oh my god, I’m so fucked up."

“The asset has not…” He swallows, gives a tiny shake of his head, he’s trying to find the words, but all he says is, “The asset has no orders, the asset has no target. The asset lacks purpose.”

Tony only has time to place his hand gently against the top of the man’s head, to feel the surprising softness of his hair, to see those blue eyes look up at him in supplication, before he’s awake again.

+

It’s two years before they see each other again. Tony should be upset to find himself back in the snow, following the trail of blood, but instead he’s excited. Sure, this means he’s still fucked in the head, but that takes a back seat to the anticipation bubbling up inside of him.

The figure is there, but Tony forces himself to look at the bodies first. More, definitely more than before, which is all he wanted to know, he doesn’t want to see his parents. He spots them anyway, but they’re farther back now.

“Right, let’s get out of here, what do you say?” He doesn’t wait for an answer, just grabs hold of the man, and wills them back to the beach. “Much better.”

His hair is short, and his eyes are glassy, and it’s English again when he speaks. Big surprise, he says, “What have I done?”

“Well, since I don’t know how much time we have, I’m gonna just go all in here. You’ve killed people. All those bodies we were just hanging out with. That’s what you did.”

“Maybe…” he licks his lips, and his eyes grow wide, wider. Tony has seen this look before in photo albums of his father’s from the war. They're the eyes of a soldier who has been out in the field far too long. “Maybe they’re just sleeping,” he suggests hopefully.

Tony shakes his head and lets his shoulders slump, and tries to figure out what the hell all of this says about him.

“Well, considering my parents have been dead a couple of years now, I’m pretty sure the rest aren’t sleeping, either. They’re dead, we have to just… accept that. I get it. Took me awhile to even be able to  _think_ that word, let alone say it. I used to go with ‘not alive,’ like that’s any better.”

“I killed them?” the man asks, and tears are spilling out of his eyes, and he is looking to Tony for answers. He looks down at his hand, looks at the remains of his left arm, and shakes his head.

“Tony,” he says, and it gives Tony chills hearing his name said like this, reverently, his entire body breaking out in gooseflesh. “I don’t remember. Nothing makes sense. I fell and… and…”

This is the most he’s heard the guy refer to himself in the first person, so he’s going to give his question another shot. “What’s your name, soldier?”

His pretty mouth moves, hesitantly, brows drawn together, and it’s like he can’t quite grasp what’s he’s fishing around in his head for. “ _Soldier_. Yes, the asset is a soldier!”

“Great.”

But as things start to fade away, the man reaches for him, reaches out through the growing darkness, and holds on, shouting, “James!” just as Tony wakes up.

+

James. His name is James. And Tony isn’t sure what’s more fucked up, that each time he goes to sleep he thinks the name to himself and hopes they’ll see each other again, or that he’s started thinking about part of his own subconscious as a person.

Not  _just_  a person, either. As some vital, missing part of himself.

James is haunting, is spilling over into the waking world, and Tony would be lying if he said he hadn’t had that name on his lips more than once while his hand was busy elsewhere. It’s the ultimate insanity, being attracted to a manifestation of your own psyche, but hey, he’s Tony Stark! Everyone thinks he’s in love with himself anyway, so why not let himself fall?

Sometimes  _years_  will pass without them seeing each other, years where the loneliness feels like something angry and alive and clawing its way out of his chest. So when they do see each other, Tony doesn’t waste time. He takes them somewhere warm, and he touches, he holds on, he comforts.

He says his name over and over again, and James clings to him as if he was a lifeline. He isn’t always comfortable being called James, especially if he’s in the leather, but he always recognizes Tony, always seems relieved to see him.

“Are you real?” James asks, the metal of his fingertips cool against the side of Tony’s face.

“I’m realer than anything,” Tony answers, and decides to do what he’s wanted to do for years now. He presses his mouth against James’s, kisses him gently, and says, “I’m as real as it gets.”

But when he wakes up, he’s alone again.

+

And then Tony Stark is kidnapped.

“Tell the asset where you are,” James demands after a broken, hollowed out version of Tony appears in the snowy expanse of their dreamscape. He tries to take them to the beach, but fails. They’re in the desert instead, but Tony is so relieved to see a familiar face that he can’t care about that, can only cry in James’s arms.

“It doesn’t matter. They’re going to kill me.”

James is in the leather, but something is different. “I remembered this time,” he shouts, shaking Tony by the shoulders. “Tell me where you are,” he demands in Russian, and when Tony laughs, James growls, kisses him, desperate and angry, and Tony just cannot understand what it all is meant to represent.

“Please,” James begs, “The asset can help, Tony. The asset…” he swallows, and his eyes are bluer than the sky. “ _I’ll_ kill them, I’ll kill every last one of them.”

He’s so angry, and so very beautiful, and none of it makes sense.

“Goodbye,” Tony says before he wakes up.

+

It isn’t the snow, or the desert, it’s their beach, and James is waiting, is staring out across the ocean, arms hanging limply at his sides as if he’s been standing there the entire time, as if he’s felt every minute, every  _second_ of their separation. When he turns, his eyes widen, and he falls to his knees. “You’re alive.”

James’s mouth tastes like tears, salty like the ocean, and he feels real, and solid. He touches Tony everywhere, as if to reassure himself, and growls when he encounters the arc reactor. “They’ve altered you?”

Tony is the one shaking, is the one with the wild eyes, and he says, “It’s okay, it’s keeping me alive,” and James looks skeptical, so he reiterates, “I’m  _alive_ ,” and this is maybe the first time he’s believed it since Afghanistan.

There are tears on his face when he wakes up.

+

Before he opens his eyes and finds Captain America staring down at him, Tony is on the beach, looking for James, but there is nobody there.

+

No matter how hard he searches, he can’t find James, and it isn’t like the absences before, something is different. He finds the snowy wasteland, but no one watches over the bodies at the end of the trail of blood. There is no one on the beach. There is no sign of James inside of his mind.

When he wakes, Tony feels as if his parents have died all over again.

+

They call him the Winter Soldier. Tony knows him only as James, as the asset. He walks into the room behind Steve, and suddenly Tony can’t breathe. He digs his fingernails into his palms, and wonders when he fell asleep, but then everything erupts into chaos.

James has seen him, the eyes Tony knows so well widening in surprise, in shock, and he lunges, pushes past Steve, and once again it feels like time has slowed down. Tony sees Natasha moving to intercept, sees Steve spinning, ready to attempt to restrain his friend, while Sam takes a step forward intending to do the same, but James is already closing the distance between them.

Things speed up again as they crash into each other, the noise of the room momentarily fading to a dull roar as arms wrap around him, and he is lifted off the ground and held close, because James is real, he’s  _real_ , he’s been real this whole time, and…

“Tony,” James gasps, and when they kiss it doesn’t feel any different than it had in the dreams, it feels the same, and Tony is laughing, and crying, and Steve and Natasha and Sam have stopped trying to pull the two of them apart, are staring and exchanging concerned looks.

“Where have you been?” Tony demands, not giving him a chance to answer, bringing their mouths together once more.

James pulls away but doesn’t let go, just stares down at Tony with disbelief and happiness in his eyes. “I thought…” he begins, but Tony interrupts him, shakes his head, and laughing says, “Didn’t I tell you? I’m as real as it gets.”

This time, there is nothing to wake up from.

**Author's Note:**

> NOW WITH [A SEQUEL! ](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4032904) You can thank all the lovely commenters, who talked me into it. :D
> 
>  **UPDATE - 7/19** Check out the [gorgeous art created by chrisdoritoevans over on tumblr!](http://chrisdoritoevans.tumblr.com/post/124047674459/im-a-piece-of-shit-and-took-1892312098-years-to)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Art for December 19, 1991](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6344989) by [Seadragon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Seadragon/pseuds/Seadragon)
  * [[Podfic] December 19,1991](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6676891) by [DuendeVerde4](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DuendeVerde4/pseuds/DuendeVerde4)




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